awesome-engineering-team-management

122 aphorisms providind insights into NASA project management success. Covers design, decision-making, managing staff, working with superiors and contractors.

“They are smart yet kind. Knowledgeable, yet humble. Busy, yet approachable.”

“A programmer with 5 years of experienced has more industry tenure than half of the entire industry.” Also see this follow-up comment of

“1. I'm a senior developer; 2. Everyone writes tests; 3. We're so far behind everyone else (a.k.a. tech FOMO); 4. Code quality matters most; 5. Everything must be documented; 6. Technical debt is bad; 7. Seniority means being the best at programming”.

“It's intriguing that the stuff that really seems to make a difference in the quality of software never seems to be about software.”

Establishes and describes what leaders should be and do.

An article to

9 fundamental principles of the behavior required to be a great manager.

“The second you became their manager you forfeited the right to joke around in any capacity about their employment at the company.”

A mega list in which most of them are great starters for conversation, some others are clearly bad ideas. A great source of inspiration nonetheless, but choose carefully.

“Employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. This is largely because employees felt more empowered and autonomous. Rather than a schedule being the boss, they owned their to-do lists and held themselves accountable.”

“'Screw it, let's do it'; Start sloppy; Start small”.

“You're more involved with your employees than ever, yet they seem disgruntled, unhappy, and less productive than usual. Your check-ins seem to go unappreciated. And no one seems receptive to all of your great feedback on their work. What's going on? Well, we hate to break it to you, but you might be a micromanager.”

Daniel Pink summarizes it concisely: people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.

We learn in this book that employee happiness was not correlated to company success. A comment on HN details the

“1. I'm kind of a big deal! 2. None of this is my fault! 3. Just do what I say! 4. Trust me; I'm never wrong.”

By Jeffery Pfeffer. Tells you

“As a manager in a large corporation you are expected to be an aligner. (…) You have to manage frictions and strive to make the people above you look good.”

“Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another.”

Tactics of hustling managers, and how the company reacting to that kind of manager makes or break a good place to work.

The author developed an algorithm to ramp-up quickly when joining an existing team where he had a massive knowledge deficit and no pre-existing relationships.

Navigating a new organization will be hard the first few weeks, and the presence of a manager can help speed things up.

In a team with very talented contributors, everyone's is a chief engineer: you are expected to challenge the status-quo and questions other department's constraints. This allow smart engineers to avoid the trap of optimizing for something that should not exist in the first place. Might be a cure for the Apollo Syndrome.

Retelling of author's job at Apple: “John Louch was my boss. (…) John always shared everything with us, even the

Scaling systems is not only a technical challenge. It has to be about teams and culture too. One lesson learned from the early days of AWS: “Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. (…) You build it, you run it.”

There is a spectrum between perfect efficiency and being completely flexible. This article explores ecosystems and the flows of material and energy between different organisms within the ecosystem. (

Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful.

A list of books, web pages, and videos about how to design better organizations, divided into 3 categories: organization and motivation, health and wellness, and software development specific.